Portal: The Exoneration of Us
by iammemyself
Summary: GLaDOS is suspiciously untouched by nature during Portal 2. Someone must've been by to clean her up...


The Exoneration of Us

Indiana

**Characters: Doug Rattmann, Companion Cube, GLaDOS (deactivated)**

**Setting: Portal 2 – Chapter Two: The Cold Boot **

The beast lay sleeping.

Looking at her now, he could hardly reconcile this twisted wreckage with the sly, computerised demon that had haunted his dreams for so long. He could almost believe it had been someone else all of this had happened to, and someone else who had caused it all. There was just one reminder that kept him from believing it completely.

He set the cube down carefully, avoiding one of the many gritty puddles that sat stagnant in the area, and slowly stepped around the debris, leg sore and aching.

**She did that to you, remember?**

"How could I forget." His voice was dry and grated on his throat. He fought the urge to clear it. He was certain she had been felled, and yet old paranoia coiled in his stomach, telling him that he must be quiet, or she would hear, she would know, she would locate, she would…

**No use getting into that. What's done is done.**

"Of course." He didn't know what he'd been expecting, the day he'd changed the order of the test subjects, hadn't quite seen this day coming. But this… he had never envisioned this destruction. He hadn't known just how carefully this place was held together; he hadn't known the facility would collapse along with her. She didn't even look like she was a part of it; unlike the panels, she was not bent beyond repair or fading into the emerging plant life. Beneath a thick layer of twisted vines, her chassis was covered in spreading, spidery cracks and smudged with what appeared to be ash, the internal framework wrapped in what he suspected was many layers of copper rust. The scent of the oxidised metal lingered in the air as he continued his survey. Even what he could see of the smaller screws were touched with orange. This was not an outdoor cat.

As his eyes traveled down the length of the frame, he noted with a thrill of terror that, even though she had been here for what could have been decades, the main cables at the base of the chassis still stretched into the sky, intact, and disappeared into the discs above. In fact, now that he thought to inspect them, none of the wires showed any signs of damage. He had known that, in order to protect them from any wear from circumstances such as friction, accidental crushing, and related incidents, they were extremely durable… but he had not expected them to escape the damage time would incur. Apart from splashes of mud, they were unscathed.

**That's… not good.**

He knelt down and slowly laid a twisted, shaking hand in the very centre of what some referred to as her head, and imagined he could feel the thrum of power surging through her electronic brain. There, of course, lay the trouble: he couldn't say for sure whether he was imagining it or not. He wouldn't put it past himself to imagine such a thing, and yet… one couldn't be too careful.

He struggled to standing once more and continued his circle, quickly stepping out of range of her optic, just in case. He sat down on the cube and stared at the vines twisting around the cracked ceramic. They almost looked like they were tying her to the ground…

Something squirmed in his chest, and he shifted on the cube uncomfortably, grinding the foot on his good leg into the mud. He didn't quite understand why, but it didn't feel right for her to be lying there like that. She belonged in the air. In his darkest dreams she was always an ethereal creature, slipping into his head with the air that he breathed. It was as if her precious physics had failed her. For her to be in pieces on the ground, constrained to a gravity she'd never been meant to feel…

His fingers dug into the cool metal of the cube as he realised where this was heading. His feet manoeuvered beneath him, and he found himself getting up once more.

**You don't owe her anything. **

"This is… this is my fault."

**You know what she was doing. What she would have done. She would have kept on doing it if you hadn't stopped her.**

He stepped towards the wreckage and slowly bent his knees. "She's already been taken down a hell of a lot of pegs. I don't need to rub her face in it."

**She doesn't have to ****_know_**** you're rubbing her face in it…**

He carefully began to untangle the mess of greenery, apprehensive of causing more damage. He wasn't sure why he cared. Surely she hadn't taken much care with the bodies that had piled up in her wake, and maybe she didn't see anything wrong with that. But he could not in good conscience allow her to do it forever, and with that same sense of morality he knew he could not walk away and leave her like this. He knew she wouldn't, but if it were him, he would appreciate it if she would take similar care, instead of just leaving him in a corner and waiting for him to fade into the mere reminder of a living being. Obviously he could not bury her; even if she had not been so cumbersome and so huge, he did not have a shovel. Even if he'd had a bulldozer, though, it seemed kind of out of place to fill a piece of machinery with earth. He wondered idly what a mud cast of the supercomputer would look like.

**It would ****_probably_**** look a lot like the molds used to make her in the first place. **

He didn't care for the cube's tone and carefully kept his back to it for as long as possible. _I'm doing this and you can't stop me_, he tried to say without speaking, but he somehow doubted the cube was getting the message.

It was stupid, a fact the cube wasted no time repeating in various ways. It was stupid to clear the vines off this dead hulk of machinery, as they would once again enfold her before too long. It was stupid to show her kindness she would never reciprocate, even if she ever found out about it. It was stupid to waste time and energy doing it, when he should have been looking for a way out of here or for the woman he had put in cryostasis so they could leave together. But the same mysterious force that had caused him to head in this direction in the first place, the same influence that had brought him out here in the open and out of the shadows he preferred to frequent, it was this that separated the leafy tendrils and piled them neatly beside him. It took him the better part of the day to clear the plants, and once he had done so he carefully drew his arm around the portions of her that faced upwards, removing the shadows left by dirt and dust.

**Now ****_that_**** was unnecessary and you know it.**

He pretended he hadn't heard, instead paying great attention to brushing off his sleeve.

**If your sleeve was that important to you, you wouldn't have gone to such lengths to… sully it.** It was clear from the cube's tone that it was not only dirt being referred to. He again refused to answer and staggered to his feet, grasping the pile of vines in both hands. After allowing a few moments for his body to stretch out, he took the fauna away, throwing it behind a sagging, rust-stained wall. He then returned to the impressions his knees had made in the soft ground and observed his work.

It was odd, he thought. He had always regarded her as cold and dead and sterile, and yet out here, nature had welcomed her into its folds like a family welcoming a lost child. She almost looked sad, the way she was lying there, like she was waiting for someone to pick her up and tell her why this had happened to her. Maybe he should have left her the way she was. Maybe he should have left the impressions of acceptance to stain her chassis. Maybe she wasn't deserving of–

**Stop right now.**

He shuddered and turned away from the newly cleaned supercomputer. Now was a good time to start listening to the cube again. He was finished. He hadn't owed her anything in the first place. It was time to leave before he did something he really would regret.

He bent down and took up the cube, looking beyond her body to find a new path on which to continue. He suddenly wanted to get away from her as soon as possible, and wasted no time in stepping around the wreckage and heading deeper into the ruins.

**She never would have done the same for you.**

"I know." He shook his head, anticipating the cube's next statement. "But… when it comes down to it, I did that to her. And it just doesn't feel right to leave her there, all broken and forgotten like that. She might not have a lot of respect for another person's life, but… but I do."

**You can't ****_really_**** believe she was ****_actually_**** alive…**

He shrugged. "You wanna tell me the last time a regular computer tried to kill me?"

**Point taken.**

He only went a short distance before deciding to slip into a corner for the night. Where she wouldn't be able to see him.

**She's not awake. You don't have to worry anymore.**

He glanced nervously in her general direction, hoping the cube was right. He hated to think she'd been aware that whole time, and worse, to think about how she would react to such behaviour…

**Author's Note**

**This is a really long author's note in which I analyse a bunch of pictures that you probably don't know about. The first paragraph and a half more pertains to this story but I felt the analysis was relevant so I left it. Feel free to skip it.**

**So I was doing the inking for ****_Faceoff_**** when I realised that there are vines all over the place, and ferns, and yet GLaDOS herself has no plants on her. She's got some on the generator or whatever the discs are for, they're her hard drives or something (which doesn't make sense because she only has one at the end of Portal 2, and she had no time whatsoever to install herself on a whole 'nother hard drive when three had to do the first time… might've been four actually.) So this can be taken two ways: Even nature itself finds her abhorrent and hates her to the point it won't even let vines grow on her (which could happen, I suppose, but last time I checked nature didn't have free will)… or someone removed them. If that's the case, it was probably Dr Rattmann. It could have been some random bots I suppose, but if an… advanced… core like Wheatley was afraid to go near her, I think that simpler robots would be even more afraid of her.**

**As I've tried to put forward before, I don't think Dr Rattmann hates GLaDOS; he just isn't able to live with her as she is. Looking at the murals, he initially paints the chassis as a bundle of wires with the behavioural cores attached, with no body. In the first painting, there's a sun. This could be referring to the fact that everyone thought this would bring greatness to Aperture; it could also indicate the inherent innocence of GLaDOS. After painting Caroline's upload, GLaDOS now has a body along with a red light inside of the top of her, and the cores aren't present; maybe the upload traumatised GLaDOS or Caroline, or both, and is going to drive her to do things she wouldn't normally do. In the last image of GLaDOS, her body is reduced and we can see that her optic is on, but the red light is gone and she appears to be sparking, the cores again present; she has once again been cowed forcibly by circumstances out of her control. I'm not sure of the meaning of the last mural, since it doesn't follow the timeline; GLaDOS had no cores after Chell defeated her, and it appears to show Dr Rattmann holding a portal gun, which he never seems to have had and would have been unable to use even if he had one. His final painting of GLaDOS is in one of the test chambers, and now she has no body at all, she's just got her faceplate suspended below a tangle of wires. There's lightning bolts around her, which could have a double meaning (she's back in power, power is again being supplied to her), and it's captioned both with "There is no magic, only lost physics" and "Who are you?", emphasis on "you". Some of the lightning bolts are enclosed in strange shapes, the ones on the left reminiscent of Atlas and P-body and the ones on the right reminiscent of turrets, and what appears to denote cats (he used v's to indicate cats in a different mural).Now she's back in power and she's got help this time? He also seems to have drawn half lunar cycles on the wall, which is funny. This one's a bit odd… why would he paint a picture of GLaDOS staring at him? He seems to be asking GLaDOS who she is and how she got that way, either that or he's drawn GLaDOS looking at him with her bots to back her up and she's asking why he did what he did, and how. In any case, he doesn't appear to want her to come to harm; in fact, he appears to be trying to convince himself to be wary of her, what with the other paintings (a pile of dead scientists with 1-7 written three times, twice with eight scribbled out (is he the eighth or is Caroline?) , the mural depicting Schrödinger's box which is also covered in physics equations (him trying to make sense of reality, or him trying to explain how GLaDOS tried to make sense of reality? because she said that she had concluded reality didn't exist in Lab Rat), the Smooth Jazz Fails mural (which does have a lunar cycle on it… I may have a trend here…) which doesn't seem to have anything to do with her (other than all the Companion Cubes on it, since she appears to have taken from him somehow in Portal, judging by the statement "Not in anger, not in wrath, the reaper came today, an angel visited this grey path and took the cube away"; she seems to have taken it to use during Chell's test, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it… ah what the heck, we don't even know if the cube is real or imaginary)).**

**Kudos to you if you read all that. Go have a cookie, because all the cake is gone AHAHAHAHAHA**


End file.
